Belarus alert

Today, around 12:30, enforcers broke into the apartment I rent and live with my girlfriend. Six people – with all but one in masks. OMON arrived at the apartment, but they were mostly looking for me. They asked my girlfriend where I was. But they didn’t identify themselves and did not present a search warrant. They only said that the search was a part of a criminal case related to some posts on Facebook. They didn’t give her anything to sign, and tore her phone from her hands.

They took a laptop, a PC, and a phone from my girlfriend, and left.

In the span of an hour, the same ‘team’ broke into my registered address, where my mother lives. My mother called the cops when they broke into her house. When they entered the corridor, one of the bastards, identifying himself as a SOBR (Interior Ministry special forces – ed.) agent, seized my 68-year old mother by her neck and threw her onto the floor. Obviously they were looking for me. It turned out that the criminal case was created either for insults, or for propagandistic threats from the journal “Soviet Belarus” by Lyudmila Gladkaya on Facebook. Most likely, the whole thing is due to two comments which I left under her post.

“Oh, one more bandit-fascist. Where do you expect to work after the revolution? Even McDonalds won’t hire you to be a janitor.”

“I think, Lyudmila, that you should be celebrating that you’re getting ready to comment, instead of being under the porch. For now. In Ukraine, about which you so often opine, you would have had a different discussion.”

I don’t know which of those posts resulted in criminal charges, nor the statute. All I can think of for now is only Article 189 (Defamation), though there’s also Article 186 (Threats of murder, by way of grevious bodily harm or destruction of property.) Tell me – where is the murder threat there? I don’t know, but I’m not surprised by anything anymore.

Of course I completely understand that this isn’t about those comments, but about the fact that the pigs need to isolate and scare me. They’re sick of my writing, my instructions, my methods and my streams. In the middle of the over 300 people who commented on Gladkaya’s post, a case was only opened against me, which is rather telling. If it wasn’t this comment, they would have found something else.

I’m at a safe place at the moment, though any safety is conditional. At the moment I’m free, and I’ll continue to do what I do. And, of course, I’m not going to delete my comments and reject my own words. And if there’s a trial – then I’ll still stand by them. They can, if they want, file another charge against me.

From you all, I ask only endurance and bravery. Don’t wait for them to drag me to the gallows. Rise up now. We will win.